The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  “How do you explain what was going on?”

  “If true—remember, these are people’s testimonies we are talking about—I think it means the Sayyid for whatever reason changed his mind at the last minute, but it was too late: Majid was already dying or dead.”

  “What happened to the body?”

  “It was tossed out like a bag of garbage into the street, which is where you saw it. Family and friends later, when it was safe, collected and buried the Sayyid in the Holy Shrine.”

  “No one opposed them?”

  “No one. He was a Sayyid, after all, a descendant of the Prophet. Holy law forbids it.”

  “I suppose it does.” I don’t know why I said that. It seemed so out of place. I needed all this to soak in and so took my time reaching out for a glass of water, topping it up, and settling back on the edge of the sofa. The judge answered the telephone. I drank and took a few deep breaths. A thousand more questions came to mind, along with the strange sensation that everything had already been said. I prepared to leave. As I reached the door, I paused and turned to look at the judge, somewhat embarrassed.

  “My apologies, Your Honor…something personal. I will not rest until I know it…I am sorry. This is the last question, I promise…Ah, let me see…My uncle is—”

  “I know who your uncle is, young man,” he replied, interrupting and looking me straight in the eye, sparing me the discomfort of having to stumble on further. “He was not there. No one brought up his name in any context whatsoever during the entire investigation. You have my word of honor on that.”

  “Thank you, sir. This country is blessed to have such an honorable man serving it.”

  —

  I left the judge’s office, and exited the thicket of concrete barriers out of the Green Zone, walking past the Ministry of Planning across the Bridge of the Republic, to Liberation Square. I continued walking, heading northwest across the square, vaguely in the direction of our neighborhood, perhaps with my apartment and Haider in mind. I can’t remember. I just walked the streets that day, shoulders drooped and head hung low as though staring at something interesting in the dirt or concrete sidewalks. But I was not looking at anything. Bits and pieces of the last four years, in pictures and snatches of conversation, were washing over my conversation with the judge, seeking to find some sort of foothold in my brain.

  Why had Uncle said Sayyid Majid was an American agent? He knew he was buried in the Holy Shrine, next to his father, two meters away from our patron saint, the Imam ‘Ali. How could he allow an American agent to be buried in such a holy location? After talking with Grandfather, I had to conclude Uncle never really believed Majid was an agent. All Uncle was trying to do was besmirch his character so as to lessen the offense, hoping to dismiss the whole affair, concealing from me in particular the enormity of what had happened.

  Mother knew Sayyid Majid personally. She knew the kind of a man he was. Had word reached her of his return before I stumbled upon his body? Did she know it was he, lying in the alley? On that fateful day, April 10, 2003, she already suspected Uncle of something. But of what? The judge said Uncle had nothing to do with the murder. Still, Mother could have suspected him of the deed. She never trusted Uncle. And why did she not tell me Sayyid Majid was a dear friend of Father’s? Perhaps he officiated over her engagement. Perhaps he was the Sayyid who signed their marriage contract.

  Mother did not want me to know these things because she too was thinking of me, and of my relation with Uncle. Whatever her own feelings, she did not want to disturb an arrangement that had served us—she and I—well since Father’s death. I can see her telling herself that…

  Grandfather thought Sayyid Majid was an honorable man. But did he know who killed him? No doubt he suspected the House of Sadr, as did many people in Najaf, all of whom kept quiet. Talking about it might have soured his relationship with Uncle, which was already bad.

  As for Haider, who knew what I knew, when I knew it, he didn’t think twice about Uncle’s being on the scene, or for that matter about who killed Sayyid Majid or why. Deep down I don’t think he cared; if he gave the appearance of caring, it was to humor me, out of friendship. Certainly my other friends and comrades in the Army of the Awaited One, and in our neighborhood, didn’t care.

  No one cared.

  The Governing Council had Kurds and Sunnis and Turcomans and Christians among its twenty-five members. None of its thirteen Shiʻa members wanted to wash their dirty laundry in front of the others. So they did not allow the subject of the killing to be discussed inside the Governing Council. “A private affair,” the non-Shiʻa members would have said. “True, we all knew Sayyid Majid to be a good man, but what business is it of ours if they don’t want to hold anyone accountable for the murder of one of their own?” More important matters of state were at stake.

  All twenty-five would have known who killed Sayyid Majid.

  The Cabal of Thirteen knew much more than the rest of the Governing Council. They knew that all the little details in the file prepared by the judge were true, as did the national security advisor, the prime minister, and the former president of the Governing Council, all of whom had personally negotiated the suspension of the arrest warrant and were the architects of its later quashing. When they came to power the following year, they concocted a new file, a file they knew to be a pack of lies designed to obfuscate and hide what had happened. They did these things because they had deals to make with our Sayyid that involved stabbing each other in the back in the Governing Council. They needed our Sayyid to approve of their way of handling the cover-up; it would make them look good in his eyes. If only they knew the contempt he held them in! Perhaps they did, and it did not matter.

  In the wake of the American war, which they benefited from the most, they worried about the consequences for their right to rule if the truth about Sayyid Majid should become known. Disgrace would fall upon them if the world knew one of their own had butchered the other and tossed his body into the street. They could not afford to lose credibility in the eyes of the Occupier, or in the eyes of the world, which was following everything like a hawk. How could the Occupier hand power to men who had so blatantly disregarded the rule of the law that they had called for while the Tyrant was still in power? And so the Thirteen conspired to cover up the murder, to prepare a phony file in order to pretend to the world that their house was in control of itself, even when it wasn’t.

  The original file the judge had prepared remained dangerous. In the hands of the House of Hakim, it could be used to blackmail and discredit the House of Sadr, which had denied them the influence over Iraq’s Shiʻa that they had taken for granted. That is why Uncle had to have the judge’s file; he needed to deal with the evidence it provided before it fell into the wrong hands. I never reported back to Uncle on my visit to the judge, and did not tell him the things I now knew. I did not want what he might have done to be on my conscience. That is also why the judge would never have given me a copy of the file even if he had one.

  The Cabal of Thirteen, the Governing Council, and every formerly exiled minister and advisor in the Shiʻa-led Iraqi governments that followed the war knew who Sayyid Majid was, held him in the highest esteem, counted themselves among his friends, but nonetheless chose to cover up his murder. Forced to confront the evidence, they would no doubt have appealed to lofty ideals, which they were compelled to place first, ahead of their personal morality and their obligation to Sayyid Majid and his family. It was after all a “noble lie,” they would say, undertaken on behalf of all Iraq’s Shiʻa. They would point to us, to men like Haider and myself, and say: “See, they are alive. We lied and we covered up in order to save them; it was all for them, only for them.”

  Everyone went along with that.

  Of course, the Occupier always knew who killed Sayyid Majid, issuing an arrest warrant because of it, and then “suspending” it after the Cabal of Thirteen clamored for it. The American military commander of the Holy City knew who killed Say
yid Majid. Paul Bremer knew. Presumably even George Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell knew. Sayyid Majid had put his trust in them as well; they were his allies too.

  Why was everybody conspiring to pretend that a dead person did not exist, and a murder in the Shrine of the Imam on the day of the fall of the Tyrant did not happen? Did they think the judge was naive and old-fashioned because he, like myself, did not know what was going on and thought it his duty to find out?

  The judge did not realize the enormity of what he was uncovering even as he was uncovering it. Truth is like that: often uncovered by those who are least aware of what they are uncovering. His colleagues at work in Najaf had a better sense of what was going on. They were the only other honorable men in this affair because they respected their colleague, and wished him well, and if they too did not want him to dig deeper, it was because they were afraid for him.

  All this evasion and fear began with a killing; one that boiled down to the hatred our Sayyid bore toward his peer from the House of Khoei. As the judge said, here were two sons of greatly revered lineage, meeting in the Holy City on a most auspicious day for both their country and their community. Their respective Houses had shaped the spiritual life of the Shiʻa, not only in Najaf, but wherever there were Shiʻa walking the globe. Was it the decades of competition over funding for students, or the petty quarrels over who had sold out to the Tyrant, or the spiteful jealousies between Arab and Iranian that came between them?

  No doubt the ideas of the fathers had poisoned the minds of the sons. Why was that not compensated for by the fact that both Houses had lost loved ones to the Great Tyrant? One stayed, grieving for his murdered father and brothers; the other fled, his brother killed in retaliation the year following. So much hurt. So much pain. Why was all that pain not directed outward at the Tyrant? Why did it not bring the two grieving men together, instead of tearing them apart?

  Even here there were secrets that no one wanted to talk about.

  Our Sayyid’s men had milled about, blocking access to the Grand Ayatollah, stopping Sayyid Majid from speaking to his father’s most illustrious student. Why go one terrible step further, and disrupt Sayyid Majid’s speech…and with guns and knives, inside the holiest of holy sanctuaries? Why have him bound and tied, pricked like a hog, then dragged as though he were a common criminal to the front door of our Sayyid’s house? How can a descendant of the Prophet do that to another descendant of the Prophet? First he orders the killing, and then he changes his mind! How shameful! And I served him for four years! If I was in denial during those years, the sordid truth now stared me in the face. And now that it had been laid bare, what did I have to turn to in its place? What was there left worth believing in?

  Nothing.

  Look too deeply into the awfulness of the world, and one must reject it, turn his back on it, and walk away. But where to? Nowhere. There is no exit from the world.

  Everyone behaved as they did because they were afraid. Just as in the time of the great Tyrant, fear had returned to become the common denominator uniting the actions of all the people in the story of Sayyid Majid. We Shiʻa who set out to build a new Iraq in 2003 did so on a foundation of fear, fear nurtured by pain and fed by lies, fear concealed by hypocrisy, and crowned by murder, more and more lies.

  What was so frightening about Sayyid Majid? He had no armies, no militia, no armed men; he was an honorable man. Was that it? Had he become the lightning rod of men’s fears because he was too honorable? Men who have known only the Tyrant’s rod don’t understand those who live by different rules. They look up to the next man with a rod; him they always understand.

  Perhaps, however, it was not the person of Sayyid Majid that was frightening; it was his story, without which his death would be lost in the ocean of dead that this benighted land of ours has offered up. The deaths of men mean nothing; their stories mean everything. We need more stories about how my people died and why. I was meant to be Sayyid Majid’s storyteller. Father would have wanted it that way.

  Meticulously collected and minutely organized, the fabric of little facts that the judge had assembled is the stuff of my ordinary Iraqi story, as ordinary as the millions of other untold stories of how my people died. But in its ordinariness, in the littleness of all its facts added up—yes, even in their sordidness—the outline of something grander is revealed, a different kind of truth, the kind that even good men turn their eyes away from, a truth that is terrifying and yet sublime, a truth far greater than the mystery surrounding the death of one honorable man.

  It is the kind of truth that threatens the powerful and the small-minded, the kind that can force the hands of courts and be manipulated for good or despicable ends; it can topple governments or enrage millions, bringing them out onto the streets peacefully for justice, or as avenging angels tearing down and ripping out everything in their way. Its harsh light is undiscriminating; it illuminates the darkest corners of men’s souls: those who wield power over others, or those who will do anything to do so, both willing to sacrifice everything in their way. Such men fear its scrutiny; they need to rule, either not knowing or deliberately concealing how small and insincere and treacherous they really are. These are the men who in the name of all of us Shiʻa of Iraq have since the fall of the Great Tyrant wrought such evil upon this poor blood-soaked land.

  If all this were so, I began to ask myself, walking through the detritus of Baghdad in the winter of 2006, who was Sayyid Majid really? Who was this man whose death could stand in for so much?

  He is not just one specific man who met an untimely death like many others. He is everyman. He is all of us. He is me.

  PART THREE

  WHEN THE WORLD

  STANDS STILL

  It happens very rarely. The earth’s axis screeches and comes to a stop. Everything stands still then: storms, ships and clouds grazing in the valleys. Everything. Even horses in a meadow become immobile as if in an unfinished game of chess.

  And after a while the world moves on. The ocean swallows and regurgitates, valleys send off steam and the horses pass from the black field into the white field. There is also heard the resounding clash of air against air.

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

  December 30, 2006

  Early Morning

  In between the hanging at 6:09 a.m. and the Tyrant’s transfer into our custody, three hours and ten minutes passed. Subtracting the fifty-five minutes it took for all the senior government officials—from the prime minister’s office, the judiciary, and others whom I did not recognize—to play with their paperwork, look important, and talk loudly to one another, and then the five minutes to walk him through a poorly lit corridor to the room in which he would await execution, left two hours and ten minutes before the trap door would clang open. Subtract another five minutes for his last walk from the waiting room to the execution chamber, and the remaining two hours and five minutes is precisely the time the Tyrant spent in the sole custody of our handpicked detail of escort guards.

  Groups of soldiers were all over the building, but only four of us were assigned to his person, two outside the only door into the room, rotating with two inside.

  The waiting room was windowless and small, and had been supplied with a chair centered along the length of a rectangular table, upon which was placed a plastic water bottle and one glass. We had been instructed to treat the prisoner with respect, and supply him with tea if requested—nothing else; it did not occur to anyone to say we could not talk to him. I am not saying our superiors approved of talking with him; I am saying the circumstance did not cross anyone’s mind, least of all ours.

  The floor was bare concrete, with cracks running between walls that had been whitewashed recently but with no attempt to repair the crumbling plaster underneath. A naked lightbulb hung from its cable, which disappeared into the ceiling without a fitting. He might have been assigned a room that, in another life, had been intended for a more sinister purpose.

  Saddam sat, stretching his
long limbs under the table; two of my comrades left the room, standing guard outside; ‘Ali, an older, poorly shaved man who looked shabby in spite of his new uniform, and I took the first watch, standing stiffly to attention at the outset in the two corners of the room facing the table. We were positioned to cover every eventuality, including suicide or something worse. I did not see the point, but those were our orders.

  —

  No sooner had ‘Ali and I been left alone in the room with him than the Tyrant began to stare at us with those eyes about which so much has been said: large, round, pitch-black, but above all unblinking and piercing.

  “You,” he said, pointing to ‘Ali, whose shirt had no collar. “Yes, you, the one fidgeting with his Kalashnikov in the corner, and rolling his eyes all over the room. Be still! I am talking to you. You are wearing sandals. Where do you think you are, son?”

  I hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it. ‘Ali had replaced his brand-new government-issue boots with sandals because the boots gave him blisters.

  “Look at the filth encrusted on your toes,” he went on quietly. “I warrant your skin has not touched water for a month. Perhaps you have not worn shoes before?”

  ‘Ali snapped to attention, not knowing what to do or say.

  “Ah…of course. You are a liberated man…I forget.

  “A pox on your liberation!” he suddenly shouted. “Degradation, I call it, not liberation.”

  He continued, his black eyes roving from Ali’s face to mine.

  “No soldier of mine was ever allowed to present himself like this. I taught them love of order, respect for authority. I gave men like you shoes…the whole lot of you! To wear shoes was both a right and an obligation, and I made sure you followed through. A soldier who is forced to be clean and disciplined, to follow exacting exercises on a daily basis, to stand in the sun with his weapon unflinchingly for hours on end, this kind of a soldier will, when asked to confront an imperialist offensive, do so unthinkingly…